Hey all! So the next round of Skadi samples came in.
I have tentatively approved them! Honestly they're still not perfect, there seems to be some complication regarding how color turns out when printed vs plastic pantone chips. But I can say that I am certainly satisfied with how it turned out regardless and that it matches my vision of how I wanted the set. These differences are pretty difficult to tell with the naked eye unless you're holding them right up to your face, at least under the lighting conditions in which I viewed them, and both Apex and I have deemed it not worth the time to go for another round considering we are approaching the one year mark of an ePBT gb.
If I wanted to be extremely, minutely nitpicky I would say:
The mod color is a little bit less saturated than the pantone chip sample
The accent color is a little warmer than the pantone chip sample
Obviously we've established that the white isn't quite WS2, it has a less blue tone to it and is more neutral in my opinion, works just fine with the rest of the set
The main legend still isn't as dark as the pantone chip, this will be greatly exaggerated in photos because the dark purple of the 520C chip absorbs a lot more light compared to the printed legends
The sub legend leans a bit more toward hot pink rather than the bright purple/magenta of the Purple C chip. This is the one that personally bothers me the most, but from normal viewing distance it actually looks correct. It'll depend on lighting too.
Compared to the renders is a whole different story, we hope that having both Marco and Oblotzky's renders gave you an idea of how it'd look in different lighting conditions. Under the shady-neutral lighting as my photos in the OP, it looks pretty bang on with the Oblo renders, but under studio lighting, it kinda looks different in photographs. At the very least I can assure you that it's not as bad as GMK Alter turned out, since that was a whole different issue.
Funny story, for some reason we're missing the "S" key from the sample kit that was provided to us so when I post the pic of the set on a board it's gonna look odd.
Apex has the rest of the kits and will be trying to take photos for you guys to see. We will confirm the order some time this week and hopefully production will begin in the next. ETA according to ePBT/KBDFans is 1-2 months. This means it miiiight bleed into the holidays and delay us further but we're hoping for the best to have these to you guys just in time for the holidays.
Finally I'd like to apologize for having taken so long. A lot of it was out of our control as we were essentially stuck waiting on ePBT to send us samples. It's taken a ridiculously long time for only 2 rounds of samples, again due to many reasons out of our control such as relocating dye sub equipment, new molds, losing our pantone chips, etc. I hope you will find the final product to be as satisfactory as I have.